Illuminating math and science. Supported by the Simons Foundation. 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting. www.quantamagazine.org
Organisms that thrive in the most unforgiving environments aren’t just biological curiosities. These “extremophiles” could have massive implications (and applications) for us thanks to their resilience.
The Organisms That Make Earth’s Harshest Places Home | Quanta MagazineExtremophiles that thrive in the most unforgiving environments aren’t just biological curiosities. Understanding their resilience has many implications for us.www.quantamagazine.orgThe idea of ‘biological agency’ — that life devises its own goals and behaves accordingly — complicates our understanding of what it means to be alive. But does it serve a scientific purpose? Find out on this week’s episode of The Quanta Podcast:
Is Life Just Different?Podcast Episode · The Quanta Podcast · July 21 · 36mpodcasts.apple.comFound in the late 1960s, researchers first isolated the bacterium 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘶𝘴 𝘢𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘶𝘴 from Mushroom Pool in Yellowstone National Park, a thermophilic (or heat-loving) microbe that helped fundamentally revolutionize molecular biology. www.quantamagazine.org/the-organism...
Carmen Sandi led some of the first studies that showed mitochondria in the brain can influence mental state. In 2021, after she boosted the mitochondria in the brain cells of anxious rats, the neurons recovered, and the rats showed fewer signs of anxiety. www.quantamagazine.org/martin-picar...
"June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal" by @jordanacep.bsky.social is featured in this anthology of science stories from @theopennotebook.bsky.social with an author Q&A and annotations by writer and mathematician Dana Mackenzie. Get your copy: www.theopennotebook.com/the-best-sci...
The Best Science Stories and How They Work: A Collection with Commentary - The Open NotebookAn invitation to engage with some of today’s most respected science journalists as they take readers beneath the surface to tell the stories behind eleven of the best science stories.www.theopennotebook.comThe idea of ‘biological agency’ — that life devises its own goals and behaves accordingly — complicates our understanding of what it means to be alive. But does it serve a scientific purpose? Find out on this week’s episode of The Quanta Podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i...
Is Life Just Different?Podcast Episode · The Quanta Podcast · July 21 · 36mpodcasts.apple.comIn what he calls his “energetic view of life,” biologist Martin Picard at the Mitochondrial Psychobiology Lab posits that distinct energetic states exist for health and disease, and that mitochondria are the tiny transformers responsible for them. www.quantamagazine.org/martin-picar...
Organisms known as “extremophiles” thrive in the most brutal corners of the planet, enduring blistering temperatures, crushing pressures, and even corrosive acid. They also offer a window into life’s deep origins — and a hypothetical peek at alien biology. www.quantamagazine.org/the-organism...
The Organisms That Make Earth’s Harshest Places Home | Quanta MagazineExtremophiles that thrive in the most unforgiving environments aren’t just biological curiosities. Understanding their resilience has many implications for us.www.quantamagazine.orgAn unorthodox solution to a major math problem came from an unorthodox place: a teenager who, after finding homeschooling confining, found her way to research mathematics.
How a High School Student Overturned a Famous ConjectureWhen Hannah Cairo was a 17-year-old high school student, she did something mathematicians had been unable to do for four decades: she overturned the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a famous prediction…www.youtube.comIn its current form, a thermodynamic computer is basically an electrical version of a set of interconnected springs. The question is: If you give it a shake, how will the dynamics of the network evolve?
Thermodynamic Computers Go With the (Energy) Flow | Quanta MagazineToday’s computers need safeguards against random energy fluctuations. Thermodynamic computers would put those fluctuations to use.www.quantamagazine.orgIntroduced by Bernhard Riemann in the mid-19th century, manifolds are crucial to our understanding of the universe.
What Is a Manifold? | Quanta MagazineIn the mid-19th century, Bernhard Riemann conceived of a new way to think about mathematical spaces, providing the foundation for modern geometry and physics.www.quantamagazine.orgThe ever-expanding list of core processes that mitochondria influence — immune activity, reproduction, metabolism, aging and longevity, and more — strongly suggests how mitochondrial dysfunctions could relate to many different diseases and disorders.
Martin Picard’s Mitochondrial Theory of Mind | Quanta MagazineThe biologist’s bold “energetic view of life” looks to the body’s strangest organelles as the link between cells, health, and mind and the foundation of our experience of being alive.www.quantamagazine.orgWe tend to think of genetics and proteins as the main drivers of health and disease. But one biologist is exploring what he considers an overlooked factor, from the level of molecules all the way up to the mind: mitochondria. www.quantamagazine.org/martin-picar...
“She did what others found impossible for so many years.” At age 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery: the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture.
How a High School Student Overturned a Famous ConjectureWhen Hannah Cairo was a 17-year-old high school student, she did something mathematicians had been unable to do for four decades: she overturned the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a famous prediction…www.youtube.comEvery time you shuffle a deck of cards, you find a configuration that has almost certainly never existed before, and never will again. But have you mixed it up enough? Find out in the latest episode of The Quanta Podcast:
How Many Shuffles Do You Really Need to Randomize Your Deck?Podcast Episode · The Quanta Podcast · July 14 · 30mpodcasts.apple.comAre cells themselves a kind of thermodynamic computer? “To my physicist’s way of thinking, it would be fair to say that nature uses Langevin computers programmed by evolution,” said Stephen Whitelam, a statistical physicist.
Thermodynamic Computers Go With the (Energy) Flow | Quanta MagazineToday’s computers need safeguards against random energy fluctuations. Thermodynamic computers would put those fluctuations to use.www.quantamagazine.orgA new preprint suggests that the Krebs cycle — a chemical reaction central to living things — might be able to occur outside the controlled confines of a cell. The findings may help us understand how life could have begun on Earth.
The Dirt That Refused To Die | Quanta MagazineLifelike biochemistry continued to unfold in sterilized soil for six years, pointing to a metabolic theory for how biology began.www.quantamagazine.orgAs a teenager, Hannah Cairo constructed a function that behaved in strange and unexpected ways, disproving a major conjecture in a field called Fourier restriction theory.
How a High School Student Overturned a Famous ConjectureWhen Hannah Cairo was a 17-year-old high school student, she did something mathematicians had been unable to do for four decades: she overturned the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a famous prediction…www.youtube.com